Learn three methods to check if your pages are indexed by Google: Site Query, Google Search Console, and third-party tools.
Millions of websites compete for rankings, but Google organizes pages by keywords before ranking them. To drive traffic, ensure your pages are indexed.
But what does indexing mean, and how can you check which pages are indexed? This article explains it all—let’s dive in!
This is the simplest method to check which pages are being indexed by Google. It also doesn't require any special tools or setup — just navigate to Google's search bar, and you're ready.
The way it works is by including a Site operator in your search. When you search Google for your domain name, followed by "site:" the search results include all the links Google's database has for your domain name.
Given below is what your search query should look like:
And this is what your search results would look like:
Now, if you're looking for a specific page, you can include its title in your search query along with the domain name and site operator. Check the screenshot below for clarity:
If the page is indexed, it will show up in search results. If it doesn't show up, then it means it's most likely not indexed.
However, this method has some limitations — it doesn’t give you actionable information. It doesn’t tell why your page is not indexed. To find it out, follow other methods given below.
Google Search Console provides two different methods of checking whether a page is indexed by Google. Here they're:
The coverage feature allows you to see which pages are indexed, which ones are not indexed, and why they are not indexed at a glance.
To access the coverage tool, go to the left-hand navigation bar and click on the 'Coverage' option under the 'Index' section. This will take you to a page that shows how many of your pages are indexed (Valid) and excluded (Not indexed). Here's what it looks like:
The Coverage feature also shows why certain pages are not indexed. For instance, it shows a N/A tag for a page that can be indexed but is not indexed because it's not included in your sitemap. Similarly, pages blocked by Robots.txt file and canonical link issues are also flagged in this section. This tells you why Google is not indexing a page.
This tool can be quite useful if you recently published an article or a page of any kind and want to check if it's indexed. Enter your URL in the search bar of the URL inspection tool, and hit the 'Search' button. If your page is indexed, you'll get this message:
If the page is not indexed, you'll get the message shown below:
The tool also shows you whether your page has been discovered by Google's crawler but still not indexed or it has not been discovered at all. This information can come in handy when you try to fix the issue that may be causing the page not to get indexed.
Finally, if your indexed pages have some issues that may be affecting their ranking, you get the following message:
When you click on the issues flagged with your pages, you also get suggestions about what can be done to fix the issues.
Besides the methods explained above, there are many 3rd party tools too that can help you check your indexed pages in Google. The 3 most popular ones among them include:
Besides these standalone tools, the index checker functionality is a feature of many SEO tools as well. All popular SEO suites (i.e., Ahrefs, Moz, SEMRush, etc.) come with their own index checkers built into them. If you use any of these suites, you can try their index checkers too.
Knowing which of your web pages Google has indexed and which ones it hasn’t is a core part of SEO and the first step toward attracting organic traffic. Therefore, it’s important to know the methods explained above for checking whether all your pages (or any specific page) are indexed or not. We hope you learned all three methods and now have the skill to identify all web pages that need your attention.
What are your thoughts about these methods of finding unindexed pages on Google? Which method would you prefer to use for this purpose? Share your thoughts in the comments and let us know. Happy blogging!